Netbooks are small, light, yet underpowered laptops. They're called netbooks due to the expectation that you're only going to use them for casual surfing of the web versus intense computing.

There are a lot of quality netbooks, but most folks get a bad experience by purching a cheap (price and quality) version versus the higher end models. Likely due to the fact that the higher end netbooks come close in price to standard laptops.

As far as lower price tablets, they're not going to offer a great experience. The $50-200 Android tablets look similar, but the parts inside, lack of app support, and old version of the OS will leave you disappointed. The higher priced, name brand tablets will offer excellent experiences, such as the Playbook, Dell Streak, Xoom, and others. One of the better reviewed tablets is the newly released Asus Transformer Prime with the first tablet quad-core processor. There are Windows tablets too, but I'd wait 9 months for Windows 8.

Both devices are quality devices, but the Kindle wins out in reviews, and subjective personal opinion. The point that drives Kindle above the Nook comes down to the extensive platform provided by Amazon currently, and likely in the future. They have buying power for media like movies, games, and apps that other vendors (short of Apple and Microsoft) will not have. Therefore, the Fire is a safer bet than the Nook if you're looking for a solid reader.

Normal drives are spinning disks with metal arms moving rapidly over top of the disks to grab data. (Picture a record player where the needle arms moves back and forth so quickly that it's a blur). Regular drives spin at 5400 RPM...faster ones at 7200. There are even drives that hit 10K and 15K RPM. However, there's only so fast you can make a drive spin before reliability suffers (and cost makes it painful to purchase).

On the other hand, solid state drives (SSDs) are like flash drives. There's no spinning disks, and the data is simply accessed through calls through the interface. In other words, nothing moves. There are slower models, but even those are significantly faster than their spinning counterparts. They use less power, making the battery in laptops last longer. They make no noise. The only downsides are that they're more expensive for less storage space, and there are questions about long-term reliability after too many reads and writes.

The quality of viewing *may* be impacted, but most streaming devices will buffer content to make up for slower and unreliable connections. If your connection is DSL, FIOS, or Cable, you'll likely not notice a difference in the quality of your experience unless you have a lot of noise in your cables or poor wiring. This deals with quality of your experience. The quality of the picture should be identical regardless of the Internet connection. With a slower connection, though, the buffering will take longer, and if the connection is unreliable, you may see the video pause while the buffer fills up again because the data stream was interrupted.

Tracphones, or any prepaid phones, are fine if you're primarily looking to make phone calls. There is speculation that the value of the prepaid phones is the limit placed on you simply owning one. Like going to the mall with only cash, you are more wary of how much you spend, and when you run out of money, you're done.

These phones are perfectly fine for most individuals. However, you're likely giving up features that other phones might offer (apps, internet access, text messaging in some cases). If these are valuable to you and increase your quality of life or productivity, then you have to weigh that cost. If your primary concern is simply price and you want to have a cell phone for limited, occasional use, these can be a good way to keep your usage and spending in check.

It's also important to consider that your signal coverage and support might be limited with these devices in remote areas, but it's debatable.

You're correct, Russ. iPads are excellent devices for many, but also expensive. Buyers must understand that in addition to the cost of the device, the cost of the apps, movies, music, and other content that should be taken into consideration. The so called "walled garden" provides tremendous content for a price.

The iPad is a content consumption device, where you can watch, review, read, and listen to media. You can type on an iPad, but this is considered tedious by many, making a keyboard accessory important for those that create a lot of content and write documents\blogs \articles. The iPad also does not handle file management well, making the transfer of content between devices difficult unless you use the Apple processes as an intermediary. (ie. you can't simply plug in a USB key and copy)

iPods are fine, but iPhones, Android devices, and Windows Phone 7 devices can provide audio capture with the added benefit of being able to make calls.